Category Archives: Family

Give me a sign

Family, Fun, Thoughts, ,

We spent last weekend with my family at my brother’s place in MD.  We had all sorts of fun but I’ll tell you about that later.  So, Sunday, we were travelling back home to West-by-God-Virginia and had to make various pit-stops.  We stopped some for drinks or snacks, some for “rest” and some to shop.  Well, I don’t really shop much so I’d say our stop at the outlet mall in Flatwoods, WV was more to buy.  Anyhow, as Isaac and I walked into one store, we came upon a sign.  It’s funny…I love that the kids “get” stuff now.  Isaac looked at me, and I looked at him and he started laughing at the wording.  Lots of stuff ran through my head including the importance of words and education and planning, but I think that it was all apparent to Isaac, even if only subconsciously.  He saw the mistakes that were made in that sign and understood why words matter.  Of course, I think he takes that to mean that he shouldn’t write any more than is absolutely necessary.  He loves to talk but trying to get that boy to hand-write a note is like pulling weeds…with your teeth.  Anyhow, I am pretty proud to say that he can properly use “they’re”, “there”, and “their” and that he knew that the wording of the sign was completely wrong.

During one of our stops, we pulled into a rest area someplace near the top of the world (or so it seemed).  The rest area had a great view so we took a few minutes to observe before our ears froze.  After getting our fill of the landscape, we walked into the place and they had signs around including this one…

I don’t think it ever would have  occurred to me that the appliance before me was a water fountain.  Again, Isaac looked at me and I at him and we both just busted out laughing!  I am pretty germ-a-phobic (which is weird since I am not dainty about much of anything) so I am pretty glad we had alcohol hand sanitizer (which we call germ wash) in the car.  Honestly, I use the stuff every time I enter my car.  Weird, huh?  Anyhow, we subdued our thirst and pressed on towards home.

Here's the view where the water was not for drinking...

We had a great trip all around, but I think one of my favorite parts was this ride home.  It’s cool how the simplest of times with the family can make for the best of times!

A decade + 1

Adventure, Awesome, Family

Today is Isaac’s birthday.  I know all parents say this, but holy cow, wasn’t he just born yesterday?!  He is growing into a wonderful young man and I am so very proud of how he is learning to carry himself, how he treats others (well, everyone but his sister) and how he sees the joy in life.

I can’t be happier to call Isaac my son!  His start was terribly rough and I never dreamed how he could go from that beginning to the wonderful kid he is today.  Happy birthday Isaac.  I love you!

Secret agent man

Family, Fun, History, ,

You folks never knew I had a secret, did you?  Well sure enough, I once had hair.  Yeah, that’s the big secret.  But these pics looks like I almost ended up being a FBI agent in the 80s I think.  I would have had lots of secrets if I had gone that way I think.  And with my memory, you should all be glad that I didn’t let my 1987 career choice take hold…I couldn’t keep my lies from my truths straight.  I honestly couldn’t remember my way out of a wet paper bag!

I have no idea why we were dressed up, but I definitely remember that get-up.  I was especially proud of the knit tie with th squared off bottom…remember those?  I had a ton of them.  I can’t imagine why I was gussied up as I never wear a tie…well, that is unless it’s for a wedding or a funeral.  I figure that either case is the end of a life and worth honoring.  Anyhow, with smiles on our faces (my brother and I were quite the duo), I doubt we were going to either a wedding or a funeral…

I worked with a guy a few years ago who always wished for a return to the days when men wore hats and the world was a bit more civilized.  I am not sure that time ever really existed but wearing hats would surely make for interesting conversation!  It seems like I had a hat just like the one my bother wears in the first picture….hmmm…I think I like nowadays when men don’t wear hats just fine.  What about you?

Braces – the final act (I hope)

Family

Well, it’s official…3/4 of my family are now in braces of some form (at least the payments tell me so).  Isaac had his braces installed 2 weeks ago and has only recently stopped complaining about how they hurt.  I didn’t figure I should approach him about taking a picture until it was safe.

The faces of Isaac - part 1
Yikes! The faces of Isaac - part 2

Anyhow, now that they are in place, he is doing well with them although having to give up Twix bars has been pretty tough.  In the car, right before he was scheduled to go into get the braces installed, he was plowing through mini-Twix bars as fast as he could!  That’s my boy!

The faces of Isaac - part 3

There are little bands of some sort that you get when the put braces on.  I think there must be 2 dozen colors from which he could choose but he decided on navy.  He claims that he will get navy every time (apparently they change them now and then).  It must be the black/rotten teeth look he is going for…or maybe he wants to be dark and mysterious.  Anyhow, they look good and we can already tell a big difference in the space between his front teeth.

Hmmmm....

When we started with Abigail’s teeth, we figured we’d have to change our vacation schedule…into taking rides about the city on public transportation.  Now that Isaac’s have started, I think my only travel will be to Walmart to my second job!

Punkins 2010

Family, Food

Is it a regional thing for people to say, “punkin”?  I can’t decide where all I have heard people say pumpkin that way.  Anyhow, we carved our punkins/pumpkins this weekend.  The kids are super squeamish when it comes to…well, about everything.  Abigail assured us that she could not continue the carving (or even start it really) without nitrile gloves.  Neither kid could bear to actually put their hands into the pumpkins to remove the stuff in fact.

Just to assert my awesomeness (and to remind the kids that I am not mentally stable), I grabbed a handful of the goo and pretended to eat it.  In fact, I did eat some of it which really sealed the deal for the kids!

They did a great job carving their pumpkins.  I saved a bunch of seeds…some for roasting and some for saving to plant next year.  We’ll see how both endeavors turn out later…

I have never seen seeds sprouting inside a pumpkin before but this year, we found several seeds which had good sprouts developing within the parent pumpkin.  I guess it is possible that the pumpkins we got were cannibals but I figure it’s just that the seeds got impatient and started to grow.

So, we lit the jack-o-lanterns and had big fun making spooky sounds and such.  I tried taking pictures and was able to get a few good ones.  I looked at the ones where I moved and believe that they may be even cooler…they sort of have a bit of spookiness to them, don’t you think?

I moved a bunch on purpose…I think it looks like they are leaking fire or something

Spitball for the generations…

Family, Fun,

We were at a birthday party last night for some family members.  It’s always a good time to get together with family.  This party was especially fun as the kids and I got to show off a little bit.  Isaac and his buddies at school must have been talking about spitballs because he asked me to show him how to properly make and deploy a first-class spitball.  When he asked, he even had straws for he, Abigail and me…I guess he figured what my answer would be.

Preparation

We headed out to the front porch and I discussed proper spitball construction material, the physics of flight and viscosity issues with cold-weather spitballing.  All-in-all, I think they received a pretty thorough crash-course in spitball mechanics.

Direct hit

Of course, we took dozens of practice shots at each other.  I was able to score hits on both kids…above the neck…before I ran inside to shelter.  Isaac and Abigail devised a master plan to lure the unsuspecting adults outside into the “shooting range”.  They begged and pleaded and sounded pathetic…every trick they could come up with to get some adult outside to help them with their “problem”.  Finally Granddad picked the short straw and took one for the adult team.

Victory!

I was proud of the kids for the expression of their new-found knowledge.  The three of us stood and looked out over the valley.  We saw the future as we stood there waiting for our straws to cool.  My newborn nephew was at this party and the kids and I schemed about all of the fun things we will teach him.  See, I am all about passing on important and useful information to younger generations!

Braces – Caller 2

Family

A little over a year ago, I was fitted with Invisalign orthodontic appliances (doesn’t that sound fancy?!).  I am still wearing them and my teeth are much straighter.  I know, it’s hard to imagine that I could be any more handsome, but my teeth are so much straighter now and I do look different (at least my Mom always told me I was a little different…) and better I think.  I don’t know how much longer I have to wear them but I am in the refinement stage now for what it’s worth.

Anyhow, a funny thing about moving your mouth around…blowing your nose doesn’t work the same.  At least for me, blowing my nose is something I am still trying to figure out.  My mouth is just shaped differently now and I sometimes blow all of the air out through my mouth rather than my nose.  I know…gross, right?  Sorry but it’s real here.

Ok, so the real reason I am writing is to report that Abigail now has expanders in her mouth.  I know this is hard to believe, but apparently she has a small mouth.  All of her teeth won’t fit in the space she has naturally so the doc is spreading her mouth wider before he attaches the regular old-fashioned braces.  So, her top expander is glued into her head while her bottom expander is removable.  Like any good kid with orthodontia, she misplaces and/or forgets it all the time.  Really though, she is doing a great job with it which makes this all easier.  We periodically have to spin a little dial on the pieces to open them a bit wider – that’s the stretch part.  As you can imagine, it is a popular event.

A few months from now, I suppose she will get her regular braces.  In the meantime, Isaac is having braces installed in a week or two.  No one doubts that his mouth is big enough!  So, if you are counting, that will make three of us in braces at the same time!  Oh, how exciting!

In other news, for our vacation this year we will be traveling about the city on public transit buses just to see what we can see.  I think they sell group passes, don’t they?  With a bald-headed discount too, right?  And I have a coupon…

We took a walk

Family, Nature, WV,

As a family, we’ve been walking in the woods lately.  There may be more to say about that later, but for now, I have just enjoyed being outside and seeing what we can see.  Abigail and I took a walk together the other day.  We sort of just roamed around and skipped rocks in the river and talked and saw all sorts of stuff.  Abigail was super interested in seeing the heavy machinery at one place we were walking, but at the same time, she was terrified it would be illegal to get near it (and maybe it was?)

Isaac spooked a deer right beside him on one walk.  It was only a few feet from him in a hay field and I think he wanted to chase it down just to chat.  I suspect he was excited enough that he might have kept up for awhile.  Outside stuff is just amazing, especially when you’ve been away from it for awhile.  We saw fish and chestnuts and spiders and trees that were probably larger than any the kids have ever seen before.

Abigail was so into this...she wanted to carry it home but I thought Emily might not appreciate our wonder

My work has been stressful lately, but these walks have been so refreshing.  I need to escape technology and it doesn’t get any better than walking in the woods with the family!

We’re in the honey!

Bees, Family, Nature, , ,

After the first unsuccessful attempt at harvesting honey this year, we decided to give it another go last weekend.  I had removed about half of the honey from the hives the weekend prior (before things went south).  I suited up again this Saturday to finish removing the honey on the remaining hives…not one single sting while I was removing the rest.  Not one!  That’s the way it is supposed to work!  I am not sure I would recommend it, but if one has normal freakin’ bees and works slowly and deliberately, one could almost work the bees buck naked.

Anyhow, I pulled the rest of the honey and we extracted on Sunday (with the help of my family!)  I nearly fainted as Isaac and Abigail both actually helped with the process.  Typically they swoop in and swipe bits of honey, then retreat to unknown locations planning their next attack.  But this weekend, they actually stuck it out for an hour or so!

Some years we get different colors of honey.  Different nectar sources produce different colors of honey.  This year, all of the honey was the same color.  That doesn’t mean that all of the honey came from a single type of flower…just that all the types of flowers they worked happened to make the same color of honey.

We have converted our honey frames over to plastic Honey SuperCell frames which I cut to size to fit in the shorter honey boxes.  There are many advantages to these type of honey frames but one thing that is both good and bad is that the bees don’t draw out the honeycomb too thick.  Really, they don’t draw it out beyond the depth of the plastic that is already drawn.  That’s good in that I don’t destroy any honey getting the frames out, but bad in that it means it’s harder to cut the cappings off.  Rather than using a knife to remove the top caps of the honey comb, we had to try something new this year – a capping scratcher.  That’s basically a fork with long thin tines that we drag over the sealed honey cells to break open the honeycomb so it can be extracted.   (All that may be confusing…basically, I can’t use a knife any more to open the honey cells…now I need to use a fork)

We spent about 4 hours on Sunday and extracted about 193 pounds of honey this year.  I am pretty satisfied with that especially considering I destroyed 25-40 pounds of honey in one of the hives I had to kill.  It’s exhausting work but we really enjoy the family time too (right family?  right?)  Like so much at this time of year (i.e. the garden), I love the build-up and the harvest but even more-so, I love its completion!

Already?

Family, WV,

Summer is officially over…well, unofficially I guess, but you get what I mean.  School starts today and I am not at all ready.  And just who on Earth starts school on a Friday?  Our county, that’s who.  It’s not that I need the kids to enjoy the freedom of summer…they live under a dictatorship anyhow.  No, it’s that the fight to get homework done starts tonight.

But wait, this isn’t about me is it?  OF COURSE IT IS!  This is my blog after all!  Well, ok, I am sad a little too because it means my kids are a bit older which means I am a bit older.  It means life is changing which is cool mostly, but also a little scary <sniff, sniff/>.

(click above to play…if that doesn’t work on your machine, try this link)

(click above to play…if that doesn’t work on your machine, try this link)

Ok, man up.  I asked the kids some questions about starting school, just like last year.  I love this part!